Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 13, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

You are also invited to check out the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

… At the age of thirty, Rooney’s role within United and England — and, importantly, how it has been portrayed by the media — has gone through numerous phases and is once again being redefined with new leadership at Old Trafford and Wembley.

Rooney first broke out onto the scene as a force of nature, an explosive, powerful, and sometimes erratic teenager. With a bullish temperament and dogged work ethic, he flourished in a role just behind the center-forward that allowed him to be a creator as well as a goalscorer. His maturity was called into question after his infamous stamp on Cristiano Ronaldo in the wake of the 2006 World Cup, but at least he was an exciting figure.

He has since mellowed, but lost a key glint of the scorching acceleration that made him so breathtaking as a teenager in the process. He is now less dazzling and awe-inspiring on the ball, but other aspects of his playing style have become enhanced: he is tactically more disciplined and has better vision. Indeed, it was during Ferguson’s final four or five years in charge of United, when he began the process of dropping into an attacking midfield role that were Rooney’s most productive years to date.

… I got hit in the face with a slap shot in 2010, which caused a high-pitched ringing sound in my ears that didn’t go away for months.

Following the code of all hockey players, I foolishly ignored the ringing and finished the season, despite my wife and kids having to shout at me like I was a 90-year-old man.

During my off-season training, I noticed that my balance was off. Like, really off.

When I got to training camp in September and stepped on the ice, it was like I was lost in space. Everything was just … white. The ice, the boards, everything blended together. I had no depth perception. When a simple pass ricocheted off the boards, it sounded like a bomb going off.

… It makes intuitive sense that our reward system — an archipelago of interconnected brain clusters that motivates goal-directed behaviors such as fleeing from predators or looking for food — and our sleep-wake cycle would coordinate with one another.

Yet, no precise anatomical location for this integration of the mammalian brain’s reward and arousal systems has ever been pinpointed.

Until now. In a new study in Nature Neuroscience, Ada Eban-Rothschild, PhD, Luis de Lecea, PhD, and their fellow Stanford neuroscientists identified a brain circuit that’s indispensable to the sleep-wake cycle as well as a key component of the reward system. They proved that revving up this circuit wakes lab mice up out of deep sleep, keeps them up way past their bedtimes, and does all the other things that reward-circuit stimulating drugs such as amphetamines do.

This statement is not in itself controversial but as I am limited to 140 characters on Twitter, it warrants further explanation. To begin, this tweet was not a criticism of the strength and conditioning programs depicted in the video. As I was adamant about in a previous post, it is unfair to judge programs based on Internet snapshots, especially when said programs don’t get to control the narrative. The suggested narrative here is that “extreme” training gives elite collegiate football programs an edge over their competitors by cultivating mental toughness. The popular media rarely covers the less sensational, more established training that likely comprises the bulk of these universities’ performance programs. As is generally the case in most fields, the things that really work aren’t always conducive to driving web traffic.

Moreover, the decision to implement “mental toughness” workouts can be mandated outside of the performance staff, often by sport coaches or front office personnel. Even if these types of workouts serve as nothing more than a brief distraction from the monotony of weight training and running, journalistic pieces like this one are not without consequences.

THE STRENGTH AND conditioning sphere is an ever-growing one in Irish sport and Ed Slattery, who works with the Ireland women’s rugby team, is hopeful that a new event can contribute to the educational process.

Slattery is running the 2016 Athletic Performance Seminar in Dublin on 8 October, when the likes of Connacht’s Paul Bunce, Neil Welch of the Sports Surgery Clinic, and the IRFU’s Martin Kennedy and Marian Earls will be among the speakers.

“I think the knowledge base is definitely increasing, and that’s only a good thing,” says Slattery of strength and conditioning in Ireland.

… Lost in that shuffle, at least on any broader scale, was the parallel movement of former U.S. international David Wagner. For four years Wagner served as Klopp’s BVB II coach in Germany, aligning with the Heavy Metal ethos of the senior team and helping to push through some of the talent that made BVB such a resurgent force over the past half decade. In that time frame, he’s also partly responsible for bringing along Christian Pulisic, who was first blooded for BVBII after it became clear he was too good for the U19 team.

So when Klopp left, more than a few folks assumed Wagner would join him at Liverpool. Apprenticing Klopp on the first team in the Premier League certainly would’ve been a step up, in prestige and in visibility if not in coaching primacy.

Wagner instead chose to take over Championship squad Huddersfield in the middle of the 2015-16 season, a path any Football Manager aficionado knows well.

The German manager, whose side top the Championship, explains why he took his players into the Swedish wilderness and discusses the Terriers’ new aggressive identity

Cold water immersion therapy is becoming an increasingly popular recovery protocol, and has been proven to improve recovery for subjective measures, but its effects on objective measures are far less apparent. Despite its ability to improve recovery, the underpinning psycho-physiological responses of this recovery method are still not fully understood. Whilst further research is needed, the attenuation of inflammatory pathways and the hydrostatic effects of water immersion both pose interesting concepts for the positive effects of cold water therapy. Furthermore, plunging into cold water may be less beneficial in terms of recovery than immersion into thermoneutral water temperatures. The chronic effects of cold water immersion are still not fully understood, but some research has suggested that it may hinder vascular and muscular adaptations from both endurance and resistance training. Lastly, a recent study has reported that the optimal immersion duration is between 11-15 minutes.

Background

Many researchers have considered the impact of physical exercise on perceptual-cognitive performance. There have also been a substantial number of studies that have examined how perceptual-cognitive skills differ between elite athletes and non-athletes. However, the knowledge on how physical exercise interacts with perceptual-cognitive skill is limited.

This systematic review aims to provide detailed information on how athletes’ perceptual-cognitive performance is influenced by acute physical exercise load and whether these effects differ between elite athletes and lesser skilled groups.
Methods

A systematic review was conducted using different combinations of the keywords physical load, acute, exercise, perception, cognition, perceptual, cognitive, sport, and athlete with the PubMed and SportDiscus databases. Additional articles were found through screening the references of these papers.

Articles had to (a) be full journal articles written in English, (b) include an athlete sample, (c) examine acute effects of physical exercise, and (d) measure a perceptual-cognitive task as the dependent variable.
Results

Twenty-six articles matched the inclusion criteria. Results suggested the impact of acute physical exercise on perceptual-cognitive performances of athletes depends on the specificity of the induced exercise and perceptual-cognitive task. Additionally, speed and accuracy were influenced differently by physical exercise. Furthermore, skilled athletes seem to be more positively influenced by acute physical exercise than novices.
Conclusion

Since many factors influence perceptual-cognitive expertise, future research should be highly precise (e.g., regarding the definition of variables, the intensity of the physical exercise) and specific (e.g., regarding the tasks used, the type of the physical exercise). [full text]

… Dr. Robin West, orthopedic surgeon and chairman of Inova Sports Medicine in Fairfax, Virginia, followed her childhood interest in sketches of the knee all the way to her current position as lead team physician for the Washington Nationals and director of sports medicine and head team physician for the Washington Redskins. She is the first woman to hold these positions in the National Football League and Major League Baseball. And while there are a handful of women who serve as team physicians in each league (eight, including West, in the two leagues combined), West’s leadership role is unique.

A few minutes in conversation with West’s mentors, colleagues, employers or, perhaps most importantly, patients quickly reveals just how well respected and universally trusted she is.

Renowned sports physician James Andrews will serve as an executive consultant on the drama from SpringHill Entertainment and Warner Bros. Television.

Fresh off Trainwreck, LeBron James is expanding into television.

The NBA superstar’s SpringHill Entertainment has sold its first scripted project to a broadcast network and it’s set in the world of sports.

The Warner Bros. Television-based production company has sold an untitled drama to NBC, which has handed out a script-plus-penalty commitment for the project about a brilliant doctor who specializes in treating the world’s greatest sports stars.

Economic and societal pressures influence modern medical practice to develop and implement prevention strategies. Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury devastates the knee joint leading to short term disability and long term sequelae. Due to the high risk of long term osteoarthritis in all treatment populations following ACL injury, prevention is the only effective intervention for this life-altering disruption in knee health. The ‘Sequence of Prevention’ Model provides a framework to monitor progress towards the ultimate goal of preventing ACL injuries. Utilizing this model, our multidisciplinary collaborative research team has spent the last decade working to delineate injury mechanisms, identify injury risk factors, predict which athletes are at-risk for injury and develop ACL injury prevention programs. Within this model of injury prevention, modifiable factors (biomechanical and neuromuscular) related to injury mechanisms likely provide the best opportunity for intervention strategies aimed to decrease the risk of ACL injury, particularly in female athletes. Knowledge advancements have led to the development of potential solutions that allow athletes to compete with lowered risk of ACL injury. Design and integration of personalized clinical assessment tools and targeted prevention strategies for athletes at high risk for ACL injury may transform current prevention practices and ultimately significantly reduce ACL injury incidence. This 2016 OREF Clinical Research Award focuses on the authors’ work and contributions to the field. The author’s acknowledge the many research groups who have contributed to the current state of knowledge in the fields of ACL injury mechanisms, injury risk screening and injury prevention strategies.

A busy brain can mean a hungry body. We often seek food after focused mental activity, like preparing for an exam or poring over spreadsheets. Researchers speculate that heavy bouts of thinking drain energy from the brain, whose capacity to store fuel is very limited. So the brain, sensing that it may soon require more calories to keep going, apparently stimulates bodily hunger, and even though there has been little in the way of physical movement or caloric expenditure, we eat. This process may partly account for the weight gain so commonly seen in college students.

Scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and another institution recently experimented with exercise to counter such post-­study food binges. Gary Hunter, an exercise physiologist at U.A.B., oversaw the study, which was published this month in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Hunter notes that strenuous activity both increases the amount of blood sugar and lactate — a byproduct of intense muscle contractions — circulating in the blood and augments blood flow to the head.

… Dutch football coach and fitness expert Raymond Verheijen spoke as part of a sports-analytics conference in Barcelona on Friday, and as one of the leading authorities on the effects of rest, fatigue and rotation on players and teams, I questioned him about Barcelona’s schedule.

He explained the tough situation that sees coaches forced to choose between overplaying their best players and making changes thanks to fixture congestion, saying: “If your players are accumulating fatigue and their performance drops and injuries go up, one way to fight that is rotating your team. You avoid the players accumulating fatigue, but if you rotate the players, you don’t play with your strongest team every game.

“The moment you start to rotate your players the team gets weaker, there is more miscommunication and performance problems. Coaches fight the symptoms, but in reality, a new problem happens. It’s a difficult situation. Coaches have to choose between two bad things.”

Although more than 20 years old, Market Basket Analysis (MBA) (or association rules mining) can still be a very useful technique to gain insights in large transactional data sets. The classical example is transactional data in a supermarket. For each customer we know what the individual products (items) are that he has put in his basket and bought. Other use cases for MBA could be web click data, log files, and even questionnaires.

With market basket analysis we can identify items that are frequently bought together. Usually the results of an MBA are presented in the form of rules. The rules can be as simple as {A ==> B}, when a customer buys item A then it is (very) likely that the customer buys item B. More complex rules are also possible {A, B ==> D, F}, when a customer buys items A and B then it is likely that he buys items D and F.

To perform MBA you need of course data, but I don’t have real transactional data from a retailer that I can present here. So I am using soccer data instead. From the Kaggle site you can download some soccer data, thanks to Hugo Mathien. The data contains around 25.000 matches from eleven European soccer leagues starting from season 2008/2009 until season 2015/2016. After some data wrangling I was able to generate a transactional data set suitable for market basket analysis. The data structure is very simple, some records are given in the figure below: